


Recreational

by archea2



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Detective Noir, Drama, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Lestrade writes m/m erotica, M/M, Metafiction, Romance, Smut, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 18:35:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1560086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestrade/Gregson (unrequited), Lestrade/Sherlock. Check out the kink tags with every new chapter.</p><p>Greg Lestrade has a secret hobby that no one, and certainly none of his co-workers at the Yard, knows about: he writes m/m detective noir erotica. As the years go by, and his private life dwindles to nil, the hobby becomes more and more obsessive, sheltering him from any real commitment. </p><p>Then Sherlock Holmes crashes his professional and personal space, and the line between fact and fiction turns dangerously thin...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kestrel337](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kestrel337/gifts), [grassle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grassle/gifts).



It was Question 7 in the typewritten booklets which Sister Perpetua used to hand around when prepping them for the Holy Sacrament of Penitence. Like Sister, the booklet was black-clad, parched, and a tough ordeal for the boys. Confession, they both made it clear, was a multiple entry test with a mile-wide margin for error. Even Tommy Vaughan who feared nobody and nothing, not even becoming Sister’s poster boy for blasphemy by answering ‘Jesuralem’ when asked to name Jesus’s native town, had gaped at Question 7.

 

_Have you sinned in bad readings, bad writings, bad wishings, bad fancies and imaginings, immoral perusings, immodest looks, acts, words, reveries, visions or anticipations before going to sleep?_

 

"It means, have you been naughty," their mentor had said primly before she zipped on to Question 8 ( _Have you sinned in pride?_ ) and parsed it for the next ten minutes with a strafing round of examples and much lip-smacking. (Cathechism, it seemed, came with its own exponential laws.) All the boys, including Greg Lestrade – big-and-brown-eyed, fresh into his teens with no father to answer his own muzzy, itchy questionings - were left to face the daunting 7 on their own. The next day, Greg knelt down on a wooden form and croaked in his new boy-voice about reading _The Fantastic Four_ under his bedsheets with his Scout flashlight. (He didn’t think of telling about the soft pinch in his midsection every time Johnny Storm, his favourite, bloomed into a red-hot, tumescent hero across the page.) The old priest chuckled and let him go with a warning against early myopia.

 

Twenty-five years later, a man with a protected view on mortal sin and a first-hand (left hand, really) experience in deleting it before sleep, he would have known what to tell. Or not. For this wasn’t material for an easy confession, what took place late at night, in the moonlight glow of his laptop. Greg himself no longer knew how to call it; had stopped questioning the worth or the wicked of it; only knew that it was, to him, an addiction - but also a healing, a strength; a silly hobby, that could make him the laughing-stock of the entire police force if found and exposed; and possibly, when it came down to what he _really_ was, the sum of Greg Lestrade outside of his working hours – the best thing he’d ever done.

 

"Secret" was the word for it, he guessed. A secret that made him glad, that made him proud. And, if truth be told, that made him not a little scared.

 

* * *

 

 

 

The secret began with Gregson, Tob Gregson, "Toblerone" to his peers in the steam-and-neon underworld that was the Met gym. Much as he hated the pet name, Lestrade quickly found that oggling Tob's chocolate abs with the rest of their bunch was not an option. Tob himself was aware of the adulation and saw no problem with it: he was, if anything, a very immodest vessel for Greg's immodest looks. Greg went to bed thinking of Tob's chest, slick from the steam and effort and mapped out for the press of his hands, only to awake with his sex begging again for the tight curve of his fist.

 

The year was 1992, with Clause 28 still lording it in England. Clause 28 did not forbid you to be a homosexual. It simply said that homosexuality was to be kept at home and made it a sin onto the law to show, mention or simply acknowledge its very existence within the pale of a British institution. And so Lestrade showed up at work with a wedding ring, though his marital prospects were well behind him at the time, and remembered not to tilt his gaze in the locker-room. Wouldn't do to cop a peep southward too often, even here where the men’s cheerful "poofter!" bounced across the tiled walls on their way to shower. This was something Greg had caught quickly on, how the men used an all-male defensive code while their bodies sang another tune, one that was never credited, never raised in chorus. Ten years into the force, and he'd learnt more slurs for sodomy than the Roman curia would ever think of. He’d had his arse slapped from every possible angle with a damp towel. And like any other guy, he’d been called "fag" - "give us a fag, you fag!" - and "queen" on the strict proviso that he was neither and took it all in accordingly good cheer. The words made his guts wince, but he’d learnt to grin and bounce them back.

 

Tob was towel-slapper supremo, though whether he did it to channel Greg’s attention or because Tob was a stickler for any rule and convention under the sky wasn’t clear. For a while, Greg was content to return the favour. Tob’s he-curves were quite superior in his and everyone else’s estimation, and the whistle and crack of the towel on that too-too-solid flesh with its perfect upcurves echoed in Greg’s ears long after he’d slipped back into this trousers.

 

They were something of an item at the time. Greg-and-Tob, the Met’s honorary boy starlets, locked in a rat race for promotion. They went at it teeth and claws, running circles around each other in a spirit of harsh camaraderie, both of them good-natured and foul-mouthed. Tob, who lived in a Soho bedsitter, was a bachelor by name and a ladies' man by night — except for the nights (three times a week!) when he joined Greg at the gym.

 

This was 1992. A fast, high, agonizing year in Greg Lestrade’s life.

 

The race ended when they both made it to the list of honours and Toby clasped Greg’s shoulders in a Soho beer den, one moody October night, saying "I'm not done with you, me old poofter".

 

And immediately showed himself a man of his word by punching Greg smack on the lips when the other man leant in to nuzzle his jaw.

 

The next ten minutes saw them outside the pub, Greg dabbing at his mouth with a paper napkin and swaying on his feet in a half-hearted attempt to play dumb drunk. They both knew he’d only had a pint. Tob, eyes on the rainy street, apologized profusely. A cab was seen, was stopped, and - "See you at work, then?" came, dreary and inevitable. Greg knew tnat was it, then. That was the end, because something had focused out of blur at last, Tob’s cowardice or confusion, he didn’t know and cared even less. They would never cross path again in that warm, humid matrix where their bodies had met at play, their breaths chafed into heat by the effort and close, so close it sometimes felt as if Tob’s heart pulse beat in his own red veins.

 

Greg boarded the car and told the cabbie to drive him home.

 

* * *

 

 

The rain slowed the ride, letting him reach home when it was already too late for sleep. Greg tried to think of something to do that would distract his mind. His mail, for one thing. His mum was still uninformed that "our Greg" now ranked among the best of the Yard. Poofter of the year, Greg thought, his mouth too numb for a sneer as he opened his ThinkPad. (Too late for the phone. Print it tomorrow, send it before work. Typewritten suited her eyes better now, she had said on his last visit, his staunch, unsoftening Ma, proudly concealing her fear that he would end up without a son of his to see him through old age.)

 

_Dearest Ma,_

_Guess what? I've made it! Won’t Mrs Gordie and Father Stephen be thrilled? I bet you’ll be telling him first thing after Mass! Well, this is to tell you the heavyweights notified us today. I'm Detective Inspector all right, me and another lad. We made a night of it but I’m giving no incriminating details, mind! And yeah, before you ask, you're the first civilian and the first lady to hear the great news. Now, Ma, the salary_

 

Nausea struck before he could recall the figure, climbing him hand-over-hand until his throat locked horribly and he gagged. He rose, turned his back to the screen and stumbled across the room to the lower bookshelf on which he stashed the booze. The Bourbon blistered his mouth twice before it sent him back to his desk,  still standing, his fists clenching against the hard wooden surface. Fake oak. He too, paying lip-service to their fucking rules, lying the truth away. Fake, fraud. Enough.

 

Before he knew what he'd done, he’d deleted his words. The screen was white and new. Greg sat down again and began to type.

 

_I'm not done with you, say you, but while you speak I feel. You'll feel when it's my turn to speak, and isn't that a promise. You nod into the rain. I’ll tell you everything, I say, blow by blow, and everything starts with my hand in the crook of your thighs.  Everything is every suck of my mouth, the same that's telling you, while my hand slaps and wooes your cock in turn into a hard stand. Am I right, Tob? Are we good now? So let me hear you for good, every breath out a wet moan as you turn and face the wall, your trousers bunched down well under your thighs, your feet apart and the glory that is your arse bucked up just so I can peep at your gloryhole, Tob, and I_

He was breathing the night air in, large gulps of it. He typed further. Strange, how the words which seemed to originate at random piled across the screen with slick, radiant facility, urging the scene to its climax. He was writing about something that had never taken shape, and it felt more real than all their sad little skirmishes of the past months _now I’m in you, so deep you couldn’t tell me from your guts, Tob, and all you say is more,_  and he didn’t care if he was hard now, after lust had been punished and sent home bleeding. Part of him was gushing out through the words, truer than any part they’d made him play, and the words drove him higher, and harder, until he had to stop and clutch himself with both hands under the desk. God, but this was vile.

 

Fuck, but this was good.

 

Hunched over the keyboard, he struck the keys in an unrelenting tattoo, rattling one line after another until the whole page began to wobble under his eyes. That time, he had to stop for good. But even then, he didn’t turn the laptop off. Lying on the couch, one arm limply thrown over his head, he struggled to focus on its patch of light, as if the screen was a window without a wall. Then it flickered out, the light, but he knew the words would be still there in the morning. When sleep claimed him at last, in those bottleneck hours between night and dawn, he went under with an odd feeling of relief.

 

* * *

 

 

In the morning, duly humbled, Detective Inspector Lestrade opened a new file on the laptop. With a vague sense that penance was due somewhere, or to someone, he swallowed two aspirins on the dry and told Ma about his promotion and how it meant he would have to visit less often, but the new salary and Pension Schemes, etc. etc. The existent file he saved under the non-committal title "Document 1" and left pendent on the screen, tucked between the stolider "Outside Team Logistics" and "Train Schedules to W-u-M".

 

He grabbed the M&S mac that dated back to his young divorce and stepped out under a different rain. This one was thinner, the clouds above fringed with early morning incandescence, standing bright and umoving as if they were mere observers to the fall of water. At man’s level, something parallel was happening to him. His flesh, his pride were still a pain zone,  a crumble zone after yesterday’s blow. But the pain had become secondary. At some point between dawn and day, the blow had stopped fermenting; had let itself be simply acknowkledged, as if Lestrade was staring at it from across a stretch of his own police tape. He was still livid at Tob for being a bastard and a fake and someone who didn’t want him back, but the nausea had cleared up.

 

He wondered about this a little before his bus arrived.

 

The day itself was less harrowing than he’d feared. He spent most of it in an unmarked car, driving with Sally Donovan who glanced once at his mouth in the mirror, then launched upon the order of the day. Lestrade liked Donovan, who he suspected was wrestling a few snakes too up her rank ladder, and liked the silent deal between the two of them. He would try to keep her on his team, no matter what. Upon their midday pause at a chain steakhouse – gathering proteins against their next interrogation, a fussphobic executive who might or might not have seen something that might or might not make his vice-president accessory to murder - he told her so. She merely grinned and flicked the packet of mustard out of his reach.

 

Lestrade made arrangements to sit with the Chief Inspector for a reshuffle talk on the next day and struck home in time for some shopping. If he was very, very lucky, his lip would have deflated, Tob would avoid him in the Break Room and they could turn over the whole bloody page. The simile made him wince in retrospect. Better sweep off yesterday’s bilge, then. He warmed a bowl of soup in his microwave and brought it to the desk, before he switched on his laptop.

 

 _Jesus_. Had he really written three full pages of –? Without hitting the return space bar even once ? That was —

 

Better give it a quick scan before erasing the lot. Bloody know thy bloody self and all that jizz. And a salutary warning against further Met-related flirtations. Let the penance fit the sin, as Father Stephen would say.

 

Well. That — actually — was—

 

As penitence went, that was —

 

That was really not so bad. No, sod modesty. That was sodding brilliant, if he thought so himself. Not that he had much expertise in that peculiar field, he mostly went for graphics in the porn department. Cheaper, with an immediate profit margin. But, fuck it. If Sister Perpetua had suddenly shown up with _The Boy’s Own Book of Sins_ tucked inside her wimple, she’d have had to admit that sentence about Tob’s moans curling up around the tight, sensitive weight of his, Greg’s, balls deserved an entry on its own. No way he wasn’t keeping this, this trophy. It wasn’t as if he planned to send it to the Yard's Archives, was it? What Tob didn’t know wouldn’t hurt Gregson.

 

In fact, Greg might even have a go at rewriting the thing. Now that it could be enjoyed for its own sake, not merely as whiplash against poor old Tob of the Cadbury abs, he was finding that I-and-You business a bit itchy. Much too much like a plea to Tob. Perhaps he could tone it down, or — yeah, kick You out for starters. Give the scene a bit of a frame, go for atmosphere, and —

 

A sip of cold soup, and he was typing a tentative brace of sentences.

 

_As I ran up to him, I could see him stumble and put out a hand to steady himself against the pub wall. Letting him know of my approach, I thought it better to wait until his panting had_

 

Oh Christ, no. No, no, no, no, _no_. This sounded exactly like one of the countless reports he’d been puppytrained to write after joining the Met, that used to be typed in all-caps for a better read, in a syntax as tightly corseted as Scarlet Blimey O’Hara. What, now? WHILE CHECKING THE OTHER PARTY’S ERECTION, I ASCERTAINED THAT THE CONDITION WAS FULLY RECIPROCAL AND

 

And sod it all for a lost cause. He still had time to reheat that soup and catch "Match of the Day". Lestrade switched off his computer and crossed the room to flump down on the couch, on the very spot where the fake leather had learnt to slouch under his weight.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Five hours later, he’d renamed the file "Late-Night Bust", struck a brittle compromise between stream of consciousness and third-person narrative, dubbed "Geoff" and "Tony" private eyes and dispatched Tony with a stray bullet after their third orgasm. All in all it had been a wonderful, an incredible evening, though he’d totally missed on Arsenal's score and would have to snatch a doze before his talk with the DCI. Oh well. Perhaps Donovan would agree to a sandwich in the car this time.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a reference to bondage.
> 
> All my thanks to Grassle for catching up with this and being the splendid beta she is.

The seven years that followed were years of famine, both for Lestrade’s flesh and his heart. And they were years of plenty.

 

Famine and plenty were two sides of the same coin, of course they were. One that, when Lestrade sat himself dutifully to think on his life (all of ten minutes before it took pity on him and let him off the hook by hooking him up with a fresh corpse), looked very much like a policeman’s badge. The regulation sort, stamped with Scotland Yard’s seven-point star which stood for Justice, or Truth, or Here Comes Armaggedon, no one could remember, and the EIIR insignia, which D. I. Gregson liked  to remind everyone _loudly_ stood for “Effed-up Ish, Innit Right?”.

 

But to Lestrade, the job wasn’t effed-up, not one whit. The job was a piece of cake, if you could take the gritty mouthful it delivered now and then. An apple a day, worms and all, and every day Lestrade bit, chewed, and then asked for more. A man of little imagination in daylight, he came to work his team in the same way as he had once worked his tendons and muscles in the moonlit gym, with the difference that he had never bothered to learn his gluteus maximus’s Christian name or treat it to a pint after a night’s efforts.

 

The night. Best part of the day, if you asked him. Sun and day toted up in Sunday, which hung  like a dead weight on the back of his neck the moment he pushed himself out of bed and into his kitchen. There he sat in a grey mood, looking at the table and the cupboards and the Tesco mugs, whitewashed by the sun into stiller and emptier blobs of space, his radio already begging him to buy two tins of tuna for the price of one.

By the third year, Sunday felt as if he’d struck the hard core of boredom.

By the sixth, it felt like death by Ikea, and Lestrade couldn’t wait for his next shift. His nights out, made of smoke, rain, brick and shadows, more real to him than the whitest, solidest Formica. Nah, give him the glistening black-blue of the Docklands, his headlights blurred into  raw gold by the rain while he stood watch over a corpse, his team hot upon his every word of command. (He’d tried jogging. The park was too green and his knees hurt after an hour.) Give him the neon lights in the Met’s interview rooms, where he grubbed for the truth until it came out with the same hard, sordid light, and his heart swirled with pride and relief. And the neon lights in the morgue, all the morgues, where they made Lestrade’s shadow loom up vertical against the stacks of metallic drawers, a reminder of how alive he was. And London’s flashing signs, old and new, spelled out across the night sky in primary red and blue when he cruised the West End in his own blues-and-two’s. When he’d been good, Donovan let him put on Sinatra. God, but he loved his job.

(He’d tried the pub. Still gave it a go, but made a beeline for the bar after one of the ladettes who went for a full pint and made it known had _offered him her seat_.)

They made a whole, the lights and shadows, and Lestrade loved them. They made him whole, only – only, not quite. But that was a story for another day. Night. When he could spare himself a minute to sit down and think on his life.

 

Not now, not when he was hitting the CID floor, so late it was turning almost too early, rough on the surface and ready to collapse, but glad for his exhaustion because it was melting all the phone rings in every office into something softer, gentler, like the warm talk of loved ones.

Job was folks and job was friends, even if Lestrade was aware that his team and he – eh. It couldn’t be that harsh camaraderie anymore, not with him being their boss and already a bit grey around the gills. They loved him (sort of), loved working under him, but to him it felt more like taking a long drive on the A9, with every man and woman of them riding a parallel lane to his. Sometimes one of them strayed closer, a window buzzed open,, and he got to know them, know their life stories. But they never asked for his in return and he never volunteered to tell it. As the years wheeled by, most of the those who had known him in his rakish debuts were steered to other squads or drifted away.

 

Only Donovan stayed, and it was Donovan who set the pace for his aging, showed him how far he’d come and how downhill. She still pestered him about getting a life, and she still left a paper trail of green and pink leaflets in his office, to be perused in his mid-morning break. They were ads for various hobbies, which Sal obviously thought were  the miracle cure for his work addiction. Seven years ago, the pink ones had been all about speed-dating; the green sheets about rock-climbing, paintball and (in one hotly, indelibly embarrassing case) Tantra Yoga.

 

Now it was – Lestrade scrunched up gummy eyes and sighed – a class for learning the Hawaian guitar. And another for growing his own eco-friendly beets in Hackney. God help him.

* * *

Well, no one could say he hadn’t tried. At first, at least, in years one and two. Ask him (only, don't ask at work. Where Lestrade still showed up in a golden ring, and where the rumours about his invisible missus – She-That-Must-Not-Be-Named, he knew they called her, or Mrs Columbo – still bubbled up once in a while, usually after he’d gruffly declined to show up at the Met’s Christmas do. Or compare his lunchbox with those of the other D.Is’, especially young Dimmock’s, a freshman in crimefighting and matrimony, whose beef sandwiches were always cut into perfect isosceles, one brown and one white to accommodate his dyspepsia, with the crusts off the bread).Yeah, ask Lestrade and he would tell you the name every gay haunt east of the Thames. Back when many of the gay clubs which called themselves Heaven and Freedom were still underground, former wine cellars or segments of railway tunnels, and those which stood aboveground painted their windows black. Lestrade had padded down their stairs on a Saturday night and left the place dutifully at 2, turning up the collar of his Mac when a police car whacked by, while the other habitués went on to cruise in the nearby parks. He didn’t, but he didn’t always leave alone.

 

The problem began the moment he took them home. Some of his Saturday shags stayed on all of Sunday, some didn’t. On a few occasions, the shag became a weekly fixture, only to vanish into thin air after a fortnight.

 

_Gavin chuckled around his cigarette and tugged his fedora rim back, so that its shadow fell only sideways on the rugged but handsome face. The singer’s voice missed a beat at the sight, turning the melancholy blues into a silence that rippled into the smoky, lowlife bar until every head was turned to them._

__

_“Missed me?” he said softly, taking another step forward. The Kid shuddered, his face made tender with hope as clear as the eyes never leaving Gavin’s face._

__

_“Oh yeah. Looks like Happy Hour has struck twice, kid.”_  

 

The point with the shags – Lestrade could tell you their names, too, only he was never sure the names were what they said they were – was this. They were always younger. They were sharp-featured, heartless and cocky, as young Tob had been when he had first imprinted his fist on Lestrade’s mouth corner and his cheap scenario for dismissal in Lestrade’s life. They were always vulnerable, as Tob hadn’t been. And they always left first.

 

_The young man, whatever his real name was, was laid out before the fireplace, his long form trussed up all in one silky length of material. A scarf, its red sheen echoing the red shadows of the embers, it snaked down from his slender wrists, joined together in a sinful parody of prayer, wound itself coaxingly around his parted thighs, then made a dash across the Kid’s naked chest and round his neck. The last of the red silk matched the Kid’s full mouth, visible under the thin veil which covered it, twirled into a tight flourish at the center of his lips. The Kid tilted his neck up in a soft plea, and the silk stretched taut across his gorgeous face._

__

_"Oh, kid." Gavin shook his head, his gun still fuming at the mouth as he took in the sight. He dropped smoothly to one knee and kissed his fingertips, then touched them to the scarf, tracing the half-laughing, half-vexed pout under the flimsy silk. "See? That’s what happens when you get tied up with the wrong company."_

 

As the years went by, and the boys filed in and out, Lestrade began to collect – not souvenirs, not quite, but features. Salty, salient gestures, faces sad and joyful, a broken identity parade featuring all the lovely, broken boys he’d found and lost in the course of those years. Some of the fragments stayed only to haunt him, like the slit-eyed, satiated air on 'Jason’s’ face when Lestrade had surprised him sitting on the bed and smoking one of his own cigarettes, legs akimbo, two fingers already pushed down to the last knuckle into Lestrade’s wallet.

 

_“Yours,” the Kid said hoarsely, but Gavin merely shook his head._

__

_“Not in this beat, kid. It taught me all I know about yours and mine, and they’ve rhymed with lyin’ too many nights for comfort.”_

__

_“But not me,” the kid  whispered, his blue eyes giving the lie to the bitter scent of coffee, dawn and disillusion._

 

Like ‘Kev’s’ black hair, pooling around his pale fallen-angel’s face at the crack of day, one arm highflung over his head and across Lestrade’s pillow, the day before Lestrade found him in a skip not yet cold with his nose still bleeding.

* * *

 

After that Lestrade stopped bringing boys home. His clubbing nights trickled out to every other Saturday, then once a month, until they stopped altogether. He was taking more and harder cases in his stride, turning the media’s attention to  “Detective Inspector G. Lestrade”. Twice the Guardian asked for a photograph which made it trickier to hush his name and trade, while the thought of becoming one of the “silver-haired gentlemen” in the old Marilyn songs they still played on vintage nights at Heaven made him sick at heart.  

 

Sometimes he wondered if the Met bore him a grudge for not mating with “one of their own” after the Tob debacle. Bit like the Great Spirits of yore, when they threatened the local youths with no beavers for a week and a dose of the clap if they so much as cocked an eye at the girl-next-clan. Or, in his case, the boy-next-cave.

 

If he’d had the guts, he’d have – come out, out of the blue, to the Boys in Blue. Laid Mrs D.I. Godot to rest, put down the golden ring and come clean to his team. But it was too late. He had made his lie, and now he had to wed it and bed it.

Still, he knew there was still one happy place for him. He, Greg, had been there before, a ‘there’ that took so little space, hardly a few inches on his screen, but gave infinite freedom. And there he came back in the end, so that he could be the full sum of who he was. Not his team’s agony uncle or the Met’s honorary old boy. Fuck, no. Just – a detective and a man, and good at both.

* * *

 

Greg’s first comeback took place in the third year, one March Saturday while his neighbours’ Hoover roared indefatigably over his head and the sky drip-drip-dripped on his balcony. He padded back to his bedroom and drew every curtain in the room before he climbed back into bed. Then he switched on his bedside lamp, put the radio on a cottony jazz medley, and pulled his laptop slowly into the golden pool of light.

 

The names gave him little trouble. His new alias, now that he’d discarded Geoff (which had served him well, but was really a single-shot name), he liked for its harsh onset and elusive coda. Steel to velvet. A name fit for a detective.

 

_“It’s Gavin, kid. Hey, at least let me walk you out of here. Where the shadows are thick enough to carve and sell as black pudding. Come downtown with me, and I’ll stand you a bitter at Charley’s.”_

 

The Kid didn’t need a name, because the Kid was a shadow itself, a clear-eyed shadow. One that allowed itself to be rescued and loved, at last, to THE END, and then all over again, and again, and again. And for all that he was a ghost, no, not even that, a mix-and-match of ghosts, he made a sodding good job of it.

 

The Kid took a long drag on his cigarette, his dark head lolling against the brick wall. Then he let the smoke out slowly, blended into his breath, a tenderer mist in the night air.

 

_“…Yeah,” he said finally. And, for the first time since they’d met, he smiled – a tiny, one-dimpled, but genuine smile. “Walk me down any ‘ale’ you like, Gavin.”_


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock makes his usual late-but-dashing entrance, spanned on two chapters because he and the case rivaled for my attention. 
> 
> (The case contains two winks to ACD, one large, one small.)
> 
> As always, all my thanks to Grassle for being a wonderful beta.

Hopkins said he’d had a peep at them on his way to the gents, and weren’t they a whoopee crowd, darling. (Hopkins, who had been in a Glasgow teenage gang before the Met roped him in and knew twenty-three ways of injuring a man with a bicycle chain, loved _Twin Peaks_ and played it camp now and then, mostly to annoy his colleagues.) Forty of them, men and women, and you could hear them drooling over their little bits of pencil from the corridor.

 

Lestrade swallowed.

 

"Sir, your tie." His gopher was at his side, her voice gloomy but firm. Like the tie when he knotted it around his neck.

 

"Copper up, man," was what Jones said when he met them in the lift.

 

"Give us a good show," was what Jones did not say, though Lestrade knew he was trying to get the credit for the Lestrade Journo Bingo that was all the rage these days. Launched the week before, when the gory fate of Dolores Ferguson - formerly Peru’s darling and its most temperamental Miss before her marriage to champion F1 driver Robert ‘Racy Bob’ Ferguson - had sploshed over every front page and thrown Lestrade under the limelights.

 

And thus - "Don’t say anything I wouldn’t," the Super had instructed him earlier with a spark off his bullet-proof glasses. They both knew he wanted the Ferguson case boxed and buried with a nice SUICIDE tag stuck to the coffin lid. The Superintendent thought that there was publicity, and there was good publicity, and then there was Lestrade telling a room filled from wall to wall with Grub Street’s finest that yeah, Mrs Ferguson had indeed suffered death by gravitation (i.e. taking a six-foot fall to her chic terrace in Sussex Gardens), and while he still couldn’t say why, or how, or with what follow-up, it had been a _shattering_ tragedy. (The Superintendent had closed his eyes and shuddered.)

 

Lestrade thought of Dolores Ferguson’s four-day-old baby. The baby who had been sleeping in the Fergusons’ bedroom that day, six feet above the faux rustic slabs where her body was found.

 

His new forensic analyst had nothing to say. Which was a relief, given the man’s inordinary talent for speaking down and through his nose in one.

 

"Sir." Donovan had materialised at the door, also in a leather jacket but without the goddamn tie hung like a flat-ironed cobra round his neck. She stopped him to straighten it, her face frowned into a strict warning. "Say when," was all she said. "And don’t let them rile you. No, not that lot. Ours."

 

Which was when Gregson, impeccably be-tied, sauntered out of the conference room with a rakish swing of hips and said, "In you go, our Greg. Warmed ’em up for you all by myself – told ’em, here goes another victory for law, order and Channel Four. Can you beat that?"

 

It was the seventh day of the seventh month in the seventh year and the Immortals were having their sport with Lestrade. By having him press-ganged.

 

* * *

 

The first to draw blood was a regular. A stocky man with a clean-shaven head who worked for a tabloid called _The Troubleshooting Star_ or something and always booked himself a front-row seat. Lestrade had found great satisfaction in casting him as Nat the Tat, the sleaziest bookmaker with an OUT OF ORDER tattoo arching over his bald skull, in Gavin Lestrade’s latest adventure.

 

"So, Inspector," the man asked, blithely unaware that he’d been shot in the middle O the previous Sunday. "Have you made up your mind?"

 

"Accident, suicide or murder?" a small woman kindly volunteered.

 

The gates were officially open; the flood poured in. "Why is Ferguson still ‘helping with the inquest’?"

 

"Did he come up with an alibi?"

 

"Are you ordering an autopsy?"

 

"It is still too early to…" but the _Independent_ ’s man, true to cast, was already butting in.

 

"We all know the lady was found clutching something in her hand – something that was a bit o’ paper with her husband’s name on it. Anything you want to tell us, Inspector?"

 

"Wrong," Lestrade barked. He was still furious with the leak, and more furious with himself for having let it slip out. "Look, I’m sorry but I really can’t let monkey with the facts. The _victim_ was holding a magazine page which happened to contain a summary of Mr Ferguson’s career. We cannot yet say to what extent this circumstance –"

 

" _Which_ career? " was divebombed from the left, followed by the inevitable "We don’t call him Racy Bob for compliment’s sake!".

 

"Did you interview…" But Lestrade couldn’t focus on the rest of the sentence. Jones was  hovering at the door, checking a square on a small card with what in Jones would always be the best part of valour. Lestrade thought he could make out Gregson just behind, waving to someone.

 

"Adultery, domestic neglect, moral humiliation, criminally negligent manslaughter?" the small woman recited in a mechanical voice, as if Lestrade had been asking for the menu du jour.

 

"Look," he tried again. They were looking at him, the hard-copy people, their eyes accordingly hard and glossy. He could see the young constable at the door, whose maiden voyage it was into the conf room, blanch a little, and braced his own shoulders in response. The trick, he reminded himself, was to stare at a point just above the turmoil of faces. When he spoke, his voice came a bit rough-edged, a bit cottony, but sharp enough.

 

"There’s no evidence whatsoever that Mr Ferguson, or anyone else, was in the house that day. This is all I can reasonably say."

 

"Why not suicide, then?"

 

"Yeah, why all the dithering?"

 

"Because –" Lestrade could feel the sweat gather in his eye corners, saltier than any tear. He blinked it away, vaguely aware of the light tattoo of fingers on the desk surface – Donovan’s signal to him that she could end it any time now. He nodded his thanks, shook his refusal.

 

"Why?" The voices sounded closer, edgier. A woman was stabbing her notebook repeatedly with her ballpoint pen. Two of the men bent their heads in whispers, and Lestrade thought he caught the worsd "…old is he again?"

 

"Because he has some reason not to, obviously." The crisp young voice had risen from the very heart of the crowd. "Dear Lord, what _is_ this? A knock-knock joke? Knock-knock, Inspector, tell us what the butler saw? How ridiculous."

 

"Who’s that?" Lestrade, still half-blinded by the sweat, asked Donovan. She began to check the list before her while his out-of-the-blue champion span a full tirade against the Medio-cracy, the decadence of the English public in matters of Q&A and, for some reason or other, the bathroom schedule of the _Independent_ 's man, seated next to him.

 

Lestrade squinted at Donovan's finger, splayed on the list, and managed to read _Sherlock Holmes, Science of…uction_ before a collective gasp drew him back to the whoopee lot. Ah, now he could see the speaker. Dark-haired, a fleece of black curls topping a pair of thick-framed black glasses on a long nerdy face, above an immaculate white shirt and black suit and a (Lestrade narrowed his eyes) Moleskine Smart notebook. Tall. Very, very, disturbingly t – oh, he had climbed on his chair. Somehow, the full-view glimpse made Lestrade blink again.

 

"Oh my gawd," a female reporter’s voice burst out in moist rapture. "He looks like Yves Saint-Laurent!"

 

"And what would the relevant question be?" Nat the Tat asked pointedly.

 

Sherlock Holmes’s gaze flickered his way with a hard spark. Not, Lestrade realized, off his glasses. Off the eyes behind, which were as blue as a Bunsen burner’s flame.

 

"In your case, why you still share your mother’s bedroom at your age, but that’s neither here nor there." The man sagged a little in his chair, ducking his chin on his chest. The crowd gaped. Lestrade stared. "Now, everyone pay attention, please. Let us skip the generic premise that the baby was Mrs Ferguson’s rather clichéd attempt to bolster her home life with a serial womaniser…"

 

Donovan’s tapping turned sharper, clicket-ier. She was going nails first now.

 

"…and tackle your collective assumption that she either jumped in a fit of post-partum depression, waving a magazine page in which her husband’s affairs were hinted at with your trade’s usual innuendo, _or_ that Ferguson was right there giving her the push. That's what you all think, don't you? One or the other? Well then, I predict a glittering Press Award for each and every of you. In the Mills & Boon section."

 

"Excuse me, are you one of us?" The _Telegraph_ ’s and _Morning Star_ ’s correspondants, for once speaking with one voice.

 

"Ah, and here’s the News Team of the Year. But wait, I think Sergeant Donovan has something to say. Make your contribution brief and relevant, please, there’s a murder to be solved. Sergeant?"

 

"You don’t think she killed herself?" Lestrade had cut in front, leaving Donovan open-mouthed and looking daggers. He pushed his chair back, one hand at his throat, tugging and loosening.

 

"I think that something in the case makes _you_ think she was killed," the man – young man? – replied, every word a dare, though Lestrade could hear a quiver in his voice, almost a plea to be heard, pulsing under the breathless, brilliant surface. "And I think it was that magazine page; I saw you wince when it was mentioned. What did it hold, that silly, gossipy, ordinary page, that's made you so wary, Inspector? A message? A picture? No, nothing so crude. It was the format, I think; something amiss there, as if – yes ! – it had been cut out! A straight, careful scissor line along its seam, zip-zip-zip. Am I right?"

 

Two long fingers opened and closed swiftly, gleaming in the July light. Lestrade watched, mesmerised. "Yeah," he said, and saw Holmes’s eyes fill with clarity, the intense blue almost pellucid. Saw another light in them, softer, younger; caught and reflected in his own grateful eyes as he answered not only Holmes, but Jones, Gregson and even the Commissioner, bunkered away in his office with his African souvenirs and his arty-farty paintings.

 

"Yeah. I don't - like it. Because if she’d acted on the spur, just opened the window and jumped, well, she’d have ripped the page out, wouldn’t she? Not held a bloody ruler to it and marked the crease? And the mag would have been there, lying by. Well, it wasn’t. And the page had been folded, too, careful-like, so it must have been given or sent to her."

 

"But there was no matching enveloppe, nor traces of one. So all you could do was keep the case open, against everyone else's judgement."

 

" _Yes_ ," Lestrade spoke it clear and loud, across the ooh-ing and ah-ing and various degrees of whoopee-ing in the crowded room, plus Sally’s horrified "Sir!". He was still looking at the young man in his white shirt and black suit, and while he did, something changed. The entire room blurred into a black and white scene, all silver and smoke and soot and moonlight shades. It could have been the docks or Rats’ Alley, or a deserted penny arcade, but whatever it was, Sherlock Holmes was in it, walking up to him under the foggy streetlights.

 

_It's a lonely night and the rats are back in business. You could do with someone at your side, Gavin._

 

Then all the colours were back, and he was standing behind his desk, dismissing all the whoopees in a loud commanding voice. One by one they slinked out under Donovan’s slightly hysterical caution about the Met’s lawyers and _please_ not to extrapolate on what was still classified information. Lestrade didn’t bother with them. He glanced at the blue-burning eyes and pointed to himself, then to the open door. Where he paused long enough to toss the limp black tie across Gregson’s shoulders before stepping on towards the lift. The giddy, glorious gulps of air spurred him on, a breathless Donovan in his stride.

 

"Sir?! Greg. Greg, you can’t. For God's sake, he’s a complete outsider. You don’t know who he is and neither do I, never saw him before and I’ve no idea who vetted him in the first…"

 

"Well, someone must have. Though I don’t get why _Science & Education_ would give a rat’s arse about what we do here, but who cares. The guy’s got brains. And at this point, we need all the help we can get."

 

"It’s not _Science & Education_. And he’d need at least a level-three CKP qualification …"

 

"Hop in."  Lestrade waited until Holmes had boarded the lift to release the Open Doors button.

 

"…or _any_ qualification. Sir, if you do this, I don’t want to be present."

 

"Suit yourself." Part of him, the part that read her pink and green leaflets, that let her knot his ties and dot his i’s for him, shrank a little at his words. He was hurting her, because this breach of…rules, decorum, call it what you will, went bang against the very grain of Donovan’s myth about him. It would leave a crack in her trust of him, and if things went to the bad it would cause her to retaliate by damaging  _his_ myth about her. By doing something equally risky and un-Sally-like, for his edification.

 

But – "Suit myself, then," was all she said, before she stopped the lift at the next floor, the forensic labs, and walked out on them.

 

Lestrade hardly noticed her gone. The first hard motion of the lift rushed them upwards again, and the answering thrill on Holmes’s face mirrored Lestrade's  own excitement. They were going to crack this case.

 

She was right, but they were good. Better than good. They were on the upbeat.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

"Here," he said less than a minute later, spreading out his only clue. "Now, look. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it clean." He thought Holmes gave him a funny look, but he carried on resolutely. "No tricks between us, mate. I’m trusting you, there’s just the two of us here, so why don’t you just drop them for a start."

 

" _What_?" Voice still hoity-toity, but more defensive now, in tune with the uncertain gesture as Holmes adjusted the thick-framed glasses on his nose.

 

"The prop. Or pose. Your disguise – nice try, but you got the mix all wrong. C’mon, mate. You all dolled up with real mother-o’pearl buttons on your shirt and a twenty quid notebook, and all you can afford is the old free-issue NHS model?" He tapped his own nose. Then, driven by some irresistible imp,  Holmes’s rather nice one. Holmes backed away. Lestrade grinned.

"And yours are practically vintage. Got some of those as a kid, well, my Ma did for me." He was laughing at the shock-stilled face before him, then stopped laughing because Holmes, once he’d shaken off the prop with a toss of his head, looked such a kid himself, his face left naked, sort of, and – yes, strangely vulnerable.

 

"Here," Lestrade said quickly, leading him to a chair and handing him the page. "I’ll get you some coffee. You get two minutes."

 

His guest, young guest, kid guest, whoever he was, did not answer, and Greg turned his back on him rather self-consciously. The page itself he already knew by heart: a hotchpotch of facts, hearsay and Internet speculations about the Ferguson marriage, crammed into a recto-verso by the _GossHype_ reporter, who had tearfully admitted having met neither party at the time.

 

"Hitched three weeks after they met," he heard in a fast-track rumble, "first public quarrel two months later, rumours of affairs on his side, ‘more glam than harm’ whatever that means, is a divorce on the cards" – the sound of a page being turned –"nope, no divorce. Instead he crashes his car on the Anglesey Circuit in Wales, where she ‘saved his life and they sealed a new bond of blood’, blah blah black sheep. Oh, but Bob denies all ‘hanky-panky-rumpy-pumpy’, dear god, what’s with the baby speech whenever these people mention coitus, speaking of which, the baby’s on the way, all’s right with the Ferguson world. Yes, well, all this is common knowledge. Old news, in fact: the issue is two months old. Vintage, one of us might say." Under the tangle of dark curls, Sherlock Holmes darted what must have been a glowering look, though with his upper lip stuck out into a moue the effect was startlingly _gamin_.

 

"So how did she get it and why did it upset her so much? It was meant to, surely. Though perhaps not to such lengths – or depths. Oh. You’re wincing." And now a very surprised gamin.

 

"Yeah. Er, sorry." Lestrade fought the old gesture, his father’s before him, of leaning his cheek into the heel of his hand as if to rub off the last dregs of sleep, doubt or heart’s ache. With Da, it usually came with a jaunty saying trying to belie the tired face. A "Got the rough end of the pineapple" or "Son, it’s the outside of enough". Lestrade cleared his throat.

 

"It’s just – it’s such a bloody mess." (Well, he’d never been good with words on a Monday.) "That poor sod, Ferguson. Keeps saying they both wanted to give it a new go and she was so happy to be home. He’d driven them back from the hospital only the day before, the baby and her. With roses and enough stuffed beasties to fill Noah’s bloody ark. Bloody hell. Here, have a – hey! what’s up with you?"

 

For Sherlock Holmes was dancing in his Property Room. Well, not quite dancing; more like a fierce parade of twirls and kick-ups, leaping from here to there as if the man were joining invisible dots together in the room, making it his element more than it had ever been Lestrade’s.  The dance, of course, was ridiculous. And fiercely improper, even more so after Lestrade’s heartbreaking exposé. But as he followed the tall form capering in the room, all he could feel was a full-bodied tingle of wonder, both at his incredible companion and the companionship itself. Because it was there - the complicity. Togetherness. Deep in him, in the pulse that kept up dizzily with the man’s pirouettes until Lestrade cried after him. "Hey! Kid! What’s the big idea? Tell me, then!"

 

"Oh, this is wonderful." The young man paused, his face creased in an ear-to-ear grin. "My third press conf today, and I was ready to walk out when you came in. That officer before you, with the faux ruffian air, blond, arrogant, wears an elastic bustier girdle under his clothes…"

 

"Gregson?"

 

"Greg-son," Holmes echoed wickedly, turning the first syllable into a hilarious croak. "He wouldn’t even listen to my questions. His loss – his prime suspect is walking out a free man as we speak. But you! _You_ saw, _you_ listened, and now you’ve just given me the key-word. Not that you’d know, of course, but that’s all right, that’s where I come in. Oh, frabjous day!"

 

Lestrade was replaying his last outburst in his head. "Beasties?" he asked doubtfully.

 

" _Blood_. It’s been here all the time, staring us in the face, and I’ve nearly missed it all. Hers. You saw it, of course. Dark, still pungent in your mind, still the reason why you don’t want to close this case. Sorrow and pity, both virtuous motivators in your case. But I think – deep down, you know there’s more to it."

 

"His." Lestrade pointed to the page. "They say he nearly lost five pints when he had that accident. That’s important too?"

 

"Yes. But not the most important thing."

 

"Which is?"

 

"What’s at the center of any web, besides the spider? The prey. There’s the blood you saw, Inspector, and there’s the blood you didn’t, because the fly was so small and so bundled up."

 

"The baby?!"

 

"And the baby’s blood." His arm was caught, held; Holmes’s eyes on him, clear and fevered.

 

"Jesus, kid. Slow down with the special effects. Next thing, you’ll be telling me we’re looking for a vampire."

 

Later on, what would dazzle him in hindsight wasn’t that, not once during their eminently zany dialogue, he had doubted Sherlock’s word or Sherlock’s sanity. No, it was that _we_ had bubbled up on his lips so easily, like _blood_ on Sherlock’s, kindling an extra degree of light in Sherlock’s eyes.

 

"Oh, but we are, Inspector. We are."

 

A complete outsider, Donovan had called him. Well, if he is, Lestrade told himself, then so am I. He leant into the grasp, taking that leap of faith that Holmes, Sherlock, would always demand of his followers. "Gimme," he said.

 

"She killed herself, yet it was murder. She jumped of her own will, but only because someone had previously slipped that page where she would find it – possibly with the baby’s things. Your team must have checked all phone calls to the house, Inspector, and I’m ready to wager that at least one of them came from the hospital. They traced it out and dismissed it when the nurse or doctor at the other end told them it was a routine check on the new mother. I don’t think it was. I think it was a blackmail routine, which began with that page, carefully folded with gloved fingers – they know about gloves in hospitals – so that when it was spread out, the first thing she would see... "

 

"…would be the account of that accident. Where she had saved her husband."

 

"By giving him her blood. The tabloid press saw it as a scoop. The great public saw it as a loving gesture, a token of forgiveness. I see it as a strong indication that the couple not only had compatible blood groups, but of a rare type, one that would have made it necessary for the doctors to check if there was a donor in Ferguson’s immediate vicinity at the time of the accident. If I’m right, then the Fergusons both belonged to the O negative group. Blood is fascinating, Lestrade. An open book, once you’ve learnt to spell it out, and a genuine thriller."

 

Most people, he knew, would have been disgusted at that speech. Would have called it callous, if not downright ghoulish. Donovan would, for one. But to Lestrade, there was something almost innocent in Sherlock Holmes’s fascination for all things blood. It was like the dance, fierce and undisguised. Bit like his own memories of cathechism, where they all favoured Revelation over the Jesus stuff because of the rains of blood and the hairy locusts.

He knew he was smiling, because of Sherlock’s curious gaze on him while he took up the red thread thrown to him.

 

"Rhesus negative." Now he was digging back into long-lasting afternoons, science classes, the bright spot in school week because he got to sit near Cyril DeMattis who had russet eyelashes and could hit the chestnut tree when spitting out of the class window. "It would – impact on the baby’s group as well?"

 

"You’ll have to do your research, Lestrade. But if I’m right about the parents, then the baby could only have belonged to the same group, O negative. And they would know about the mother’s group at the hospital – would have asked about both Fergusons, in fact, to avoid potential complications before birth. Sometimes the staff also checks the baby’s group using the birth cord. And if the baby had a Rhesus positive…"

 

"Jesus Christ." Lestrade was staring at the page, with its gushing sob story. They’d got it all wrong, then. Not only he, but that entire roomful of paper-pushers. They’d all read the facts upside down. She had been the cheater, not Ferguson.

 

"Once, perhaps." Holmes’s voice, sharper, his grab on Lestrade’s arm harsher. "Wildly, mistakenly. Groping for – a fix, anything to dull the edge of boredom, social anxiety, solitude. But society will only see an all-time sin, especially in a woman. Then she and her husband got closer. She might even have believed her Bob was the father. The baby came, and she was, as you said, wonderfully happy. And then – someone phoned her from the hospital."

 

"The vampire." Lestrade’s throat was dry.

 

"Yes. Preying on her weakness. Physical exhaustion, worn nerves. Her guilt, perhaps, because of that one-time slip. I lack data, Detective Inspector. I can’t tell you their name or function. But I’ve given you enough to go on." Sherlock Holmes put down the sheet of paper and then, in an almost awkward motion, quite at odds with his previous recklessness, smoothed it out with his fingertips. It was a gentle touch, and it triggered a bittersweet jolt in Lestrade.

 

"Mr Holmes…"

 

"Sherlock. Please." That boyish voice again, shot with eagerness as Sherlock took the offered hand.

 

Lestrade almost said "Greg" in return. But the echo of that vile croak rose in his inner ear, tilting the balance. "Lestrade," he muttered, looking at the door. He’d never liked his name much in any case.

 

A shadow crossed the pale face, too quick for Lestrade to notice. What he didn’t, couldn’t very well miss, were Sherlock’s next words.

 

"If this works. If – when we work together again, Lestrade, as we probably will on certain occasions..." Lestrade cringed a little at the stiff voice, the sudden shift to adulthood and neutrality in Sherlock’s tones.

 

"Yeah?"

 

"We’re doing it clean, you said. No tricks between us. No props. Or poses."

 

"Well?"

 

The handsome face leant forward until Sherlock's lips were touching the tip of his ear, almost sensually. It  brought a surge of blood in Lestrade’s chest, a hot accelearating beat. "Then hadn’t you better drop that wedding ring, Detective Inspector?"

 

* * *

 

He did not see Sherlock again after his arrest of Jacky Mason, the male midwife who would plead guilty to both charges of  extortion and involuntary manslaughter.

 

He kept his eyes peeled for one tall handsome magpie reporter during his next press conf (which called for _two_ constables guarding the door, inside and outside) but Sherlock Holmes never showed up there. Nor at the following pub orgy, where the cream of Homicide and Serious Crime clapped and cheered Lestrade well into dawn, including Tobias Gregson (whose ears turned unaccountably pink when Greg delivered a playful slap to his belly afer the third round).

 

Neither was Holmes there when Lestrade took a final leave of Robert Ferguson and the ten-day-old baby, safely tucked between the man’s solid arm and his hand. "I’m not a very good man, Mr Lestrade," Ferguson had simply said. "But I think I’m a better one than she gave me credit for."

 

Lestrade had touched the baby’s head, marveling at its featherlight dusting of hair, and gone.

 

July went too and August came, and still there was no sign of Sherlock Holmes. Lestrade took his regular two weeks off and spent them in the West Country, letting his mother have one and spending the other hiking from cliff to cove. He came back with the first precocious rains which made the sky darker even when the evenings were still meant to bask in the sun’s northern light.

And it was then, at the close of a hard work’s day, that he saw Sherlock again. He had stopped to buy a pack of Marlboro reds at a corner shop near Westminster Bridge. The sky was voltage blue when he came out, outlining the dark ribcage of the bridge and the young people huddled in a knot on one side of it. They were five or six, some with the sharp jaw-angle and ever watchful eyes Lestrade had come to recognise as the badge of their kind, more than the second-hand hoodies or the sagging plastic bags. They looked, and he looked back, bracing himself against the passerby’s metabolic instinct to lower his eyes rather than take the risk of looking a voyeur to himself.

 

Then a figure detached itself from the group and came to him in a fluid step, his long coat flowing around a too-thin figure, his feet bare and strikingly white in a pair of sandals. A lighter flared up in the figure’s hand, and a boyish grin met Lestrade’s attempt to shield his eyes with his own hand. Then the flame was lowered, and Lestrade took in the eyes, crystal-clear and laughing; took in the young rumpled face, the taut body, and, held out between two fingers, the slip of paper with a phone number on it.

 

"Still ringfenced, Inspector?" the Kid asked softly.

 

Before he could answer, a sharp whistle had come from the group. He felt his hand open under another’s touch before his fingers were closed for him on the paper. Then Sherlock was running, all long-legged grace, his black coat flaring out behind him like a pirate’s sail until the bridge swallowed him.

 

"...Fuck," Detective Inspector Lestrade whispered to the night.

**Author's Note:**

> First written as a fill for a kink meme prompt. S2 jossed the fill severely, but S3 seems to have got it going again. I'll never bless the writers enough for that underground reunion scene!


End file.
